THE LA RAZA CRIME TIDAL WAVE - “These figures do not attempt to allege that foreign
nationals in the country illegally commit more
crimes than other groups,” the report states. “It
simply identifies thousands of crimes that should
not have occurred and thousands of victims that
should not have been victimized because the
perpetrator should not be here.”
CHARLOTTE CUTHBERTSON

Monday, January 6, 2014

UNDER OBAMA IT IS SOARING POVERTY FOR AMERICANS BUT STILL
SOARING PROFITS FOR HIS BANKSTER DONORS!

THERE ARE MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS IN OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN
WELFARE HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS SO THEY KEEP COMING AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE POLITICIANS’ PAYMASTERS!

Poverty vs. Democracy in America

By Daniel Weeks

Eric Thayer/Reuters

Richard says he is done being a criminal—but the law isn't
done with him. Ever since he completed his four-year prison sentence for armed
robbery, the 28-year-old from Montgomery, Alabama, has been struggling to get
back on his feet. He admits to making mistakes—"I dropped out of school,
fell into the street life … did things I shouldn't do"—but now that he has
served his time, he's asking for a second chance.

He says he can't understand why Alabama has a lifetime
ban on people with felony convictions getting food stamps or public
assistance, or why people like him don't have rights when it comes to housing
or getting hired. Although his skills as an electrician are in high demand, he
has so far been unable to find a job or a home on account of his record. But
the biggest insult of all, he says, is his lack of civil rights in the land of
Martin Luther King. Together with around four million other former felons
nationwide—most of them impoverished—Richard is legally barred from going to
the polls. "Some people don't believe in second chances," he says.
"No way my voice can be heard."

Andy and Maria were criminals of a different kind: They
picked the wrong country of birth and decided to pick again when they grew up.
Having spent the better part of their combined 177 years waiting to attain the
holy grail of U.S. citizenship, the elderly couple from Mexico take pride in
their legal status after a lifetime of unlawful labor in the fields and
factories of Texas and California. Pooling their $700 a month in Social
Security is enough to pay the mortgage on the 400-square-foot trailer they call
home in one of the unincorporated colonias outside El Paso, Texas—but
only just. In spite of their hard-won citizenship, Andy says that voting and
getting heard is a stretch. "The politicians only come here when they're
looking for votes—don't care about the little people," he says. Last
election, for example, they waited outside in line for over three hours before
casting a ballot because the state neglected to properly staff their polling
place. "I guess they didn't think any of us would vote," Maria says.
Still, she maintains that waiting in line is a small price to pay when a third
to half of their neighbors—and 22 million non-citizens nationwide—are prevented
from going to the polls.

"People that got the money, they put their people in place.
Ain't got no representation in Congress!"

Malik never broke any laws. He did not make the mistake of
being born abroad. In fact, the former social worker now on disability was born
and raised in the heart of the nation's capital. That's where he went wrong, as
far as citizenship is concerned: Malik and some 630,000 Americans living in
Washington, D.C.—along with over 4 million taxpaying U.S. citizens in Puerto
Rico and the other island territories—lack voting representation in Congress.
For most of their history, they even lacked the right to vote in presidential
elections or, for Washingtonians, to choose their city leaders. According to
Malik, it doesn't help that D.C. and Puerto Rico top the poverty charts, a fact
with which he has become personally acquainted since losing his job and moving
into an overcrowded shelter not far from the U.S. Capitol. He views poverty as
both personal and political: "People that got the money, they put their
people in place," he says. "Ain't got no representation in Congress!"

These four American citizens are imperfect, like you and I,
but that's not all. They are members of an impoverished underclass—50 million strong—whose
ranks
have swelled since the Great Recession to the highest rate and number
below the poverty line in nearly 50 years. Nearly half of them—20.5
million people, including each of the people mentioned above—are living in
deep poverty on less than $12,000 per year for a family of four, the highest
rate since record-keeping began in 1975. Add to that the hundred million citizens
who are struggling to stay a few paychecks above the poverty line, and fully half the U.S. population
is either poor or "near poor," according to the Census Bureau.

Economically speaking, their poverty entails a lack of
decent-paying jobs and government supports to sustain a healthy life. With half of American jobs
paying less than $33,000 per year and a quarter paying poverty-line wages of
$22,000 or less, even as financial markets soar, people in the bottom fifth of
the income distribution now command the smallest
share of income—3.3 percent—since the government started tracking income
breakdowns in the 1960s. Middle-wage jobs lost during the Great Recession are
largely being replaced
by low-wage jobs—when they are replaced at all—contributing to an 11
percent decline in real income for poor families since 1979. For the 27
million adults who are unemployed or underemployed and the 48
million people in working poor families who rely on some form of public
support, means-tested government programs excluding Medicaid have remained
essentially flat for the past 20 years, at around
$1,000 per capita per year. Only unemployment insurance and food stamps
have seen a marked increase in recent years, although both are currently
under assault
in Congress.

Socially speaking, poor people occupy a space apart from
mainstream. For the nearly one in four children
who are impoverished, hunger and homelessness, absent and incarcerated parents,
violence, and substance abuse are regular facts of life. These and other
"toxic stressors" contribute to high-school
dropout rates of around 50 percent and college-graduation
rates of less than 10 percent for people in poverty—five times worse than
upper-income youth. Without a high-school diploma, poor children are four times
more likely than their college-educated peers to be unemployed and 10 to 20
times more likely to end up behind bars. Regardless of high-school completion
and criminal status, close
to half of all people raised in persistent poverty remain poor at the age
of 35, transmitting the same status to their kids, while less than four
percent join the upper-middle class. Even their health is affected: Prior
to implementation of the Affordable Care Act, around four in 10 Americans in
poverty or who lack a high-school diploma also do not have health
insurance—four times the rate among non-poor people—and one
third of all deaths are estimated to result from poverty and low-education.

Half a century after civil rights, nearly 10 million
voting-age citizens are denied the right to vote or voting representation in
Congress.

But poverty in the United States is not just an economic or
social concern. As this series will explore, the poverty that Andy and Maria,
Richard and Malik, and tens of millions of "second-class citizens"
nationwide, experience is also political. It is embedded in the structure of
American society and maintained by an unequal distribution of political power.
The statistics are straightforward enough: Half a century after civil rights,
nearly 10 million voting-age citizens are denied the right to vote or voting
representation in Congress; 16 million immigrants of voting age have no formal
stake in the political process; and tens of millions more law-abiding citizens
are informally excluded from voting and other forms of participation.
Meanwhile, the politicians on whom they rely do not rely on them: A tiny
fraction of wealthy Americans lobbies the federal government while fewer than
one percent provides the lion's share of campaign funds.

In the articles that follow, I take up the question of
political voice in America through the stories of low-income people themselves.
The voices belong to an assortment of citizens and would-be citizens I
interviewed during a research tour by Greyhound bus in fall 2012 and spring
2013, backed by the Edmond J. Safra
Center for Ethics at Harvard University. In an attempt to better understand
the conditions of life my interviewees described, I lived on a poverty-line
budget of $16 per day throughout my six-week tour, excluding Greyhound fare.
The tour took me some 10,000 miles through 30 states and countless cities and
towns across the continental United States and back—hardly adequate to develop
a rich understanding of a given person or place, but appropriate to the task of
surveying the broader scene of poverty and political voice in America. While
the individuals featured in this series cannot possibly speak for the dozens of
people I interviewed and hundreds of other people with whom I spoke, I've tried
to provide a fair representation of the views and concerns expressed throughout
my travels.

Mine is not an original exploration, nor is it a definitive
account of poverty in the United States. Fifty years ago, Michael Harrington
revolutionized the way Americans saw poverty in The
Other America—at least for a generation. He did so by showing his
audience that even in the post-war boom of the 1950s and ‘60s, poverty was
real. The problem then, Harrington argued, was not so much that poor people
were rejected or forgotten: "What is much worse, they are not seen."
Harrington's nuanced portrayals of an American underclass in forgotten byways
of rural Appalachia and isolated urban slums brought the "invisible"
poor into the light of day. His writings are partly credited with launching the
War on Poverty, announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson in his State
of the Union Address 50 years ago this week. Many courageous journalists
and social critics have followed in his footsteps since.

In many ways, my job is not as hard as Harrington's. In an
age of social media and TV exposés, "the poor" are not as invisible
today as they were in the 1960s. But being visible is not the same thing as
being heard. By a host of relevant measures beyond their control, people with
limited incomes have lost their place at the table of American democracy. Poor
people walk the streets of our nation's capital. They sleep on benches on
Capitol Hill and outside the White House gates in Lafayette Square. In every
state and community in the land, they clear the trash, pick the
crops, man the gates, clean the offices, mind the children, tend
the aged, and deliver the goods that keep America going. They are ubiquitous,
they are indispensable, and they are largely silent.

When Johnson called on Congress to join him in launching a
War on Poverty in 1964, he boldly asserted, "Today, for the first time in
our history, we have the power to strike away the barriers to full
participation in our society. Having the power, we have the duty." His
campaign promised to "strike at the causes, not just the consequence"
of poverty in America. While the War on Poverty is credited with helping millions
of Americans move out of poverty, the work of extending equal opportunity and
full participation to all people in our society is far from complete. If
America intends to continue that struggle, it will have to contend with a
fundamental cause of persistent poverty today: the unintended silence of
millions of impoverished people in the sphere that matters most,
politics.

Obama’s fraudulent defense of the unemployed

By Andre Damon
6 January 2013

As Congress reassembles following the holiday break, the White House and the
Democratic Party are seeking to perpetrate a political fraud on the American
people. Having overseen the Christmas expiration of extended jobless benefits
for 1.3 million long-term unemployed people, the White House is now presenting
its call for Congress to restore the benefits for a paltry three months as a
crusade against inequality.

“Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow
Americans lost a vital economic lifeline—the temporary insurance that helps
folks make ends meet while they look for a job,” President Obama said in his
weekly address Saturday. Blaming Republicans for letting the benefits expire,
he declared, “So when Congress comes back to work this week, their first order
of business should be making this right."

The claim that blame for the expiration of federal jobless benefits rests
entirely, or even primarily, with the Republicans is a shameless lie.
Notwithstanding Republican opposition to the benefits program, the failure to
extend it past its December 28 deadline is, in the first instance, the result
of a calculated policy carried out by the White House and congressional
Democrats. By agreeing to a budget deal last month that excluded an extension
of the benefits, the Democrats ensured that the program would lapse before the
new year.

DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM 2/3s OF ALL
JOBS WENT TO IMMIGRANTS, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL. FEDERAL WORKPLACE ENFORCEMENT
of LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT of ILLEGALS PLUMMETED 70% DURING
HISPANDERING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM… and are expected to be nonexistent during his
second.

"We could cut
unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal
workers," said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the
Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. "President Obama is on the wrong side of the
American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help
citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than
fail to enforce immigration laws." REP. LAMAR SMITH

WOMEN IN JOBS… not in America! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!!!

357,000
FEWER WOMEN HELD JOBS in OCT.

FEMALE
PARTICIPATION RATE HITS NEW LOW AS JOBS ALL GO TO MEXICAN ILLEGALS.

AMNESTY….
IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED… legals still get the tax bills for LA
RAZA’S welfare state and crime tidal wave in our open borders!

What qualifies Mayorkas to serve
as DHS deputy secretary? Well, there's his prodigious fundraising in 2008 as an
Obama bundler, of course. There's his dutiful pro-open borders record in his
current job as director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. And
once again, the operational motto of the Beltway prevails: Screw up, foul up,
move up.

The study noted that, in the aftermath of the Great
Depression, the US undertook policies “during the New Deal [that] permanently
reduced income concentration until the 1970s.” In contrast, the study noted a
striking absence of any measures to reign in social inequality in the present
crisis. Far from it, the Obama administrations’ bank bailouts, austerity
program and wage-cutting policies have vastly expanded the prevalence of social
inequality.

DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM
2/3s OF ALL JOBS WENT TO IMMIGRANTS, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL. FEDERAL WORKPLACE ENFORCEMENT
of LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT of ILLEGALS PLUMMETED 70% DURING
HISPANDERING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM… and are expected to be nonexistent during his
second.

BANKSTER-OWNED S LUT FOR THE SPECIAL INTERESTS… POVERTY IN
SCHUMER’S STATE IS SOARING TO CATASTROPHIC PROPORTIONS… BANKSTER BOYS SCHUMER’S
SOLUTIONS IS TO EXPAND THE OBAMA AMNESTY HOAX AND KEEP THE NATION FLOODED WITH
ILLEGALS TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.

PROBABLY ON BARACK OBAMA WORKS HARDER FOR THE 1%, LOOTING
BANKSTER CRIMINALS AND ILLEGALS MORE THAN SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER of NY.

OBAMA’S ENDLESS LIES ABOUT BORDER
SECURITY AS HE BUILDS THE LA RAZA SUPREMACY WELFARE STATE in AMERICA

President Barack Obama responded to the Gang
of Eight with his position on immigration, which had Sen. Schumer suddenly
announcing that “border security” is not “that essential” to proposed
legislation. Prior to Schumer’s disavowal, there had been agreement on border
security.

Listen to
these ILLEGALS complain about the rampant teen pregnancy, crime and 3rd world
destruction, they have brought to U.S. sovereign territory in MATTAWA, Wash.
They want AMNESTY so they can vote, to take American tax dollars to clean up
their 3rd world BS. http://www.bostonglobe.com/new...

Immigration puts small town on cultural divide

America’s immigration impasse is a daily, dispiriting fact of life in
Mattawa, Wash., and many places where noncitizens abound

In Mattawa, as
many as 80 percent of the adults are not citizens, and many have been here
illegally for 10 or 20 years. The civic leadership does not reflect the town:
99 percent of Mattawa’s residents are Hispanic, but the mayor, the police
chief, the school board, and half the City Council are white.

Mattawa’s population soon doubled
and then tripled, transforming the little town into a full-fledged city. But
with that came problems Mattawa lacked the political power, civic involvement,
and money to fix.

Crime increased along with the
population and quickly overwhelmed the small police department. Statistics are
hard to find because the department fell into disarray, but city officials said
the small town suddenly confronted big-city problems, including domestic
violence, drive-by shootings, and gangs linked to the drug trade that took root
in an area where it is easy to hide.

Two years ago, a 28-year-old
woman, seven months pregnant, was shot and killed while unloading groceries.
Also that year, alleged gang members fired shots at a high school soccer game.
In August, a man was stabbed in a fight at home. In October, shots were fired
at a car parked at a grocery store not far from City Hall.

Nationwide, immigrants
who are not citizens make up 20 percent or more of the population in more than
100 American cities and towns, US Census figures show. In Massachusetts, a
third of the residents of Chelsea are not citizens, almost five times the
national average. In Everett and Malden, 1 in 4 residents isn’t a citizen. In
East Boston, almost half the residents could
not vote on the recent casino referendum because they were not citizens.

(you can believe that the number of illegals in Los
Angeles is FAR, FAR, FAR greater than the numbers noted below. Visit and see
what the Mexican occupation looks like. Look around and see Mexicans in ALL
service and construction sector jobs!)

In New York and
Los Angeles, the numbers are staggering. New York has more than 1.4 million
people who are not citizens, the highest in the nation. Los Angeles has more
than 877,000, almost a quarter of the city.

LA RAZA LOOTS WASHINGTON STATE and FLOODS IT WITH ILLEGALS,
ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS and FRAUDULENT IDs

By Thomas Gaist 6 January 2013

During testimony last Friday in US bankruptcy court in Detroit, the city’s emergency manager acknowledged that financial schemes Wall Street banks foisted on the city in the mid-2000s were probably illegal. The swaps deals with Bank of America-Merrill Lynch and Swiss-based UBS cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars and have been cited as a major cause of the city’s financial crisis.

In reality, the settlement falls far short of holding
JPMorgan accountable for its fraudulent sale of mortgage-backed assets, which
netted the bank tens of billions of dollars in profits while exacerbating the
sub-prime mortgage crash that led to over ten million foreclosures in the US
and a global economic downturn that thrust many millions more into unemployment
and poverty.

Rather than
Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while
claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare
and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

“Records show
that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

JP
MORGAN

BARACK OBAMA’S BANKSTER-BOUGHT REGIME of CORRUPTION SERVING
CRIMINAL BANKSTER DONORS, BILLIONAIRES, the 1% and LA RAZA ILLEGALS!…..the rest of us get the tax bills for
their crimes and looting!

PROBABLY THE ONLY TRUTH OBAMA
EVER TOLD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE WAS THAT HE WAS “NOT HERE TO PUNISH BANKS!”…
NOPE, AND HE NEVER HAS. THEIR CRIMES, LOOTING AND PROFITS HAVE SOARED UNDER
OBAMA.

YOU WOULD NOT HAVE FOUND
OBAMA’S DOJ GOING AFTER OBAMA’S PALS AT JP MORGAN. HOLDER IS TOO BUSY
HISPANDERING FOR LA RAZA, SUING AMERICAN STATES AND SABOTAGING OUR LAWS AND
BORDERS SO THE OBAMANATION CAN BUILD HIS LA RAZA PARTY BASE of ILLEGALS.

“Records show
that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

This is the unadulterated voice of finance capital
speaking. It should be recalled that JPMorgan is deeply implicated in the
speculative operations that have devastated the lives of hundreds of millions
of workers around the world. In March of this year, a US Senate committee
released a 300-page report documenting the criminal practices and fraud carried
out by JPMorgan, the largest bank in the US and the world’s biggest dealer in
derivatives. Despite the detailed revelations in the report, no action will be
taken against the bank’s CEO, Jamie who enjoys the personal confidence of the
US president.

banks, student loans,
crony books

NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO
ORCHESTRATE AN ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE MORE THAN BARACK OBAMA and aPACK OF HIS CRIMINAL BANKSTERS!

“Records show
that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

A CASE OF INCEST! OBAMA PARTNERS WITH WALL STREET’S BIGGEST
CRIMINAL BANKSTERS, MOST OF WHOM NOW WORK IN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION!

CRONY CAPITALISM: OBAMA PROTECTS JP MORGAN, THE BIGGEST
BANKSTER CRIMINALS IN AMERICAN HISTORY, AND ONE OF OBAMA’S BIGGEST BANKSTER
DONORS!

Nearly five years after the greatest financial crash since
the Great Depression, triggered by rampant illegality and fraud on the part of
the major banks, not a single major institution or leading bank executive has
been indicted, let alone tried, convicted and jailed.

The criminal charges are part of an attempt by the Obama
administration to create the appearance that it is cracking down on Wall Street
criminality, while it continues to shield top executives and allow banking
fraud and criminality to continue unabated.

“Records show
that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

…no
filthy politician in American history has taken more loot from looting
banksters than the WALKING CON JOB BARACK OBAMA… and not one bankster has gone
to prison! HOW’D THAT
HAPPEN?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?$?

“Records
show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial
industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase
($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”

Obama’s fraudulent defense of the unemployed

By Andre Damon 6 January 2013

As Congress reassembles following the holiday break, the White House and the Democratic Party are seeking to perpetrate a political fraud on the American people. Having overseen the Christmas expiration of extended jobless benefits for 1.3 million long-term unemployed people, the White House is now presenting its call for Congress to restore the benefits for a paltry three months as a crusade against inequality.

“Just a few days after Christmas, more than one million of our fellow Americans lost a vital economic lifeline—the temporary insurance that helps folks make ends meet while they look for a job,” President Obama said in his weekly address Saturday. Blaming Republicans for letting the benefits expire, he declared, “So when Congress comes back to work this week, their first order of business should be making this right."

The claim that blame for the expiration of federal jobless benefits rests entirely, or even primarily, with the Republicans is a shameless lie. Notwithstanding Republican opposition to the benefits program, the failure to extend it past its December 28 deadline is, in the first instance, the result of a calculated policy carried out by the White House and congressional Democrats. By agreeing to a budget deal last month that excluded an extension of the benefits, the Democrats ensured that the program would lapse before the new year.

DURING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM
2/3s OF ALL JOBS WENT TO IMMIGRANTS, BOTH LEGAL AND ILLEGAL. FEDERAL WORKPLACE
ENFORCEMENT of LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT of ILLEGALS PLUMMETED 70% DURING
HISPANDERING OBAMA’S FIRST TERM… and are expected to be nonexistent during his
second.

"We could cut
unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal
workers," said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the
Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. "President Obama is on the wrong side of the
American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help
citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than
fail to enforce immigration laws." REP. LAMAR SMITH

WOMEN
IN JOBS… not in America! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!!!

357,000 FEWER WOMEN HELD JOBS in OCT.

FEMALE PARTICIPATION RATE HITS NEW LOW AS JOBS
ALL GO TO MEXICAN ILLEGALS.

AMNESTY…. IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES
DEPRESSED… legals still get the tax bills for LA RAZA’Swelfare state and crime tidal wave in our
open borders!

THERE ARE MILLIONS OF ILLEGALS IN OUR JOBS AND BILLIONS IN
WELFARE HANDED OVER TO ILLEGALS SO THEY KEEP COMING AND KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE POLITICIANS’ PAYMASTERS!

Poverty vs. Democracy in America

By Daniel Weeks

Eric Thayer/Reuters

Richard says he is done being a criminal—but the law isn't
done with him. Ever since he completed his four-year prison sentence for armed
robbery, the 28-year-old from Montgomery, Alabama, has been struggling to get
back on his feet. He admits to making mistakes—"I dropped out of school,
fell into the street life … did things I shouldn't do"—but now that he has
served his time, he's asking for a second chance.

He says he can't understand why Alabama has a lifetime ban on people with felony convictions
getting food stamps or public assistance, or why people like him don't have
rights when it comes to housing or getting hired. Although his skills as an
electrician are in high demand, he has so far been unable to find a job or a
home on account of his record. But the biggest insult of all, he says, is his
lack of civil rights in the land of Martin Luther King. Together with around
four million other former felons nationwide—most of them impoverished—Richard
is legally barred from going to the polls. "Some people don't believe in
second chances," he says. "No way my voice can be heard."

Andy and Maria were criminals of a different kind: They
picked the wrong country of birth and decided to pick again when they grew up.
Having spent the better part of their combined 177 years waiting to attain the
holy grail of U.S. citizenship, the elderly couple from Mexico take pride in
their legal status after a lifetime of unlawful labor in the fields and
factories of Texas and California. Pooling their $700 a month in Social
Security is enough to pay the mortgage on the 400-square-foot trailer they call
home in one of the unincorporated colonias outside El Paso, Texas—but
only just. In spite of their hard-won citizenship, Andy says that voting and
getting heard is a stretch. "The politicians only come here when they're
looking for votes—don't care about the little people," he says. Last
election, for example, they waited outside in line for over three hours before
casting a ballot because the state neglected to properly staff their polling
place. "I guess they didn't think any of us would vote," Maria says.
Still, she maintains that waiting in line is a small price to pay when a third
to half of their neighbors—and 22 million non-citizens nationwide—are prevented
from going to the polls.

"People that got the money, they put their people in place.
Ain't got no representation in Congress!"

Malik never broke any laws. He did not make the mistake of
being born abroad. In fact, the former social worker now on disability was born
and raised in the heart of the nation's capital. That's where he went wrong, as
far as citizenship is concerned: Malik and some 630,000 Americans living in
Washington, D.C.—along with over 4 million taxpaying U.S. citizens in Puerto
Rico and the other island territories—lack voting representation in Congress.
For most of their history, they even lacked the right to vote in presidential
elections or, for Washingtonians, to choose their city leaders. According to
Malik, it doesn't help that D.C. and Puerto Rico top the poverty charts, a fact
with which he has become personally acquainted since losing his job and moving
into an overcrowded shelter not far from the U.S. Capitol. He views poverty as
both personal and political: "People that got the money, they put their
people in place," he says. "Ain't got no representation in Congress!"

These four American citizens are imperfect, like you and I,
but that's not all. They are members of an impoverished underclass—50
million strong—whose ranks have swelled since the Great Recession to
the highest rate and number below the poverty line in
nearly 50 years. Nearly half of them—20.5 million people, including each of the people
mentioned above—are living in deep poverty on less than $12,000 per year for a
family of four, the highest rate since record-keeping began in 1975. Add to
that the hundred million citizens who are struggling to
stay a few paychecks above the poverty line, and fully half
the U.S. population is either poor or "near poor,"
according to the Census Bureau.

Economically speaking, their poverty entails a lack of
decent-paying jobs and government supports to sustain a healthy life. With half of American jobs paying less than $33,000
per year and a quarter paying poverty-line wages of $22,000 or less, even as
financial markets soar, people in the bottom fifth of the income distribution
now command the smallest share of income—3.3 percent—since the
government started tracking income breakdowns in the 1960s. Middle-wage jobs
lost during the Great Recession are largely being replaced by low-wage jobs—when they are replaced
at all—contributing to an 11 percent decline in real income for poor
families since 1979. For the 27 million adults who are unemployed or
underemployed and the 48 million people in working poor families who
rely on some form of public support, means-tested government programs excluding
Medicaid have remained essentially flat for the past 20 years, at around $1,000 per capita per year. Only
unemployment insurance and food stamps have seen a marked increase in recent
years, although both are currently under assault in Congress.

Socially speaking, poor people occupy a space apart from
mainstream. For the nearly one
in four children who are impoverished, hunger and homelessness,
absent and incarcerated parents, violence, and substance abuse are regular
facts of life. These and other "toxic stressors" contribute to high-school dropout rates of around 50 percent
and college-graduation rates of less than 10 percent
for people in poverty—five times worse than upper-income youth. Without a
high-school diploma, poor children are four times more likely than their
college-educated peers to be unemployed and 10 to 20 times more likely to end up behind bars.
Regardless of high-school completion and criminal status, close to half of all people raised in persistent
poverty remain poor at the age of 35, transmitting the same status to their
kids, while less than four percent join the upper-middle class. Even
their health is affected: Prior to implementation of the Affordable Care Act,
around four in 10 Americans in poverty or who lack a
high-school diploma also do not have health insurance—four times the rate among
non-poor people—and one third of all deaths are estimated to result
from poverty and low-education.

Half a century after civil rights, nearly 10 million
voting-age citizens are denied the right to vote or voting representation in
Congress.

But poverty in the United States is not just an economic or
social concern. As this series will explore, the poverty that Andy and Maria,
Richard and Malik, and tens of millions of "second-class citizens"
nationwide, experience is also political. It is embedded in the structure of
American society and maintained by an unequal distribution of political power.
The statistics are straightforward enough: Half a century after civil rights,
nearly 10 million voting-age citizens are denied the right to vote or voting
representation in Congress; 16 million immigrants of voting age have no formal
stake in the political process; and tens of millions more law-abiding citizens
are informally excluded from voting and other forms of participation.
Meanwhile, the politicians on whom they rely do not rely on them: A tiny
fraction of wealthy Americans lobbies the federal government while fewer than
one percent provides the lion's share of campaign funds.

In the articles that follow, I take up the question of
political voice in America through the stories of low-income people themselves.
The voices belong to an assortment of citizens and would-be citizens I
interviewed during a research tour by Greyhound bus in fall 2012 and spring
2013, backed by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard
University. In an attempt to better understand the conditions of life my
interviewees described, I lived on a poverty-line budget of $16 per day
throughout my six-week tour, excluding Greyhound fare. The tour took me some
10,000 miles through 30 states and countless cities and towns across the
continental United States and back—hardly adequate to develop a rich
understanding of a given person or place, but appropriate to the task of
surveying the broader scene of poverty and political voice in America. While
the individuals featured in this series cannot possibly speak for the dozens of
people I interviewed and hundreds of other people with whom I spoke, I've tried
to provide a fair representation of the views and concerns expressed throughout
my travels.

Mine is not an original exploration, nor is it a definitive
account of poverty in the United States. Fifty years ago, Michael Harrington
revolutionized the way Americans saw poverty in The Other America—at least for a generation.
He did so by showing his audience that even in the post-war boom of the 1950s
and ‘60s, poverty was real. The problem then, Harrington argued, was not
so much that poor people were rejected or forgotten: "What is much worse,
they are not seen." Harrington's nuanced portrayals of an American
underclass in forgotten byways of rural Appalachia and isolated urban slums
brought the "invisible" poor into the light of day. His writings are
partly credited with launching the War on Poverty, announced by President
Lyndon B. Johnson in his State of the Union Address 50 years ago this week.
Many courageous journalists and social critics have followed in his footsteps
since.

In many ways, my job is not as hard as Harrington's. In an
age of social media and TV exposés, "the poor" are not as invisible
today as they were in the 1960s. But being visible is not the same thing as
being heard. By a host of relevant measures beyond their control, people with
limited incomes have lost their place at the table of American democracy. Poor
people walk the streets of our nation's capital. They sleep on benches on
Capitol Hill and outside the White House gates in Lafayette Square. In every
state and community in the land, they clear the trash, pick the
crops, man the gates, clean the offices, mind the children, tend
the aged, and deliver the goods that keep America going. They are ubiquitous,
they are indispensable, and they are largely silent.

When Johnson called on Congress to join him in launching a
War on Poverty in 1964, he boldly asserted, "Today, for the first time in
our history, we have the power to strike away the barriers to full
participation in our society. Having the power, we have the duty." His
campaign promised to "strike at the causes, not just the consequence"
of poverty in America. While the War on Poverty is credited with helping millions
of Americans move out of poverty, the work of extending equal opportunity and
full participation to all people in our society is far from complete. If
America intends to continue that struggle, it will have to contend with a
fundamental cause of persistent poverty today: the unintended silence of
millions of impoverished people in the sphere that matters most,
politics.